Fannie Lou Hamer Research Paper

Fannie Lou Hamer was born Fannie Lou Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississippi on October 6, 1917. She was born into poverty and grew up in a tar-paper shack with a roof patched up with tin, sleeping on a cotton sack stuffed with dry grass. She was the youngest child of twenty, which included fourteen boys and six girls. Her parents, Lou Ella and Jim Townsend, were sharecroppers. Her family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi in 1919 from the east of the Mississippi Delta to work on the E. W. Brandon plantation. At the age of six, she joined her family in planting cotton, picking cotton, and cutting corn. She attended school through the sixth grade but was forced to drop out at the age of twelve because she could no longer afford it. As a result, she worked full time in the cotton fields to help support her family and continued her education with Bible study. Hamer joined the Stranger’s Home Baptist Church and was baptized in the Queen River. As a down-to-earth Christian, she loved listening to gospel music and learned words to many religious songs during freedom ride field trips. Hamer could be described as an average, self-deprecating …show more content…
Marlow was already well informed about her attempt to register to vote and demanded that she withdraw her application, but Hamer refused. She responded, “I didn’t go down there to register for you. I went down to register for myself.” As a result, not only had she been ordered off the plantation she had lived and worked on for eighteen years, but her husband lost his job too, yet he was still required to stay and work through the harvest in order to pay off the family’s sharecropping debt. Papa drove her from the plantation, where she stayed with friends in Ruleville for a few days. On September 10, 1962, there was sixteen bullets shot into the Tuckers’ home in search of Hamer. She then fled to Cascilla near Tallahatchie County, where she stayed with rural relatives for some